A distinguished academic career and a lifelong interest in fungi, botany and nature conservation made Sir John Burnett, who has died after a short illness aged 85, the ideal champion for biological recording in the UK. He held that effective nature conservation could be achieved only if good quality information about species and their habitats was accessible to all who needed it - a belief that made him perfectly suited to run the National Biodiversity Network, founded in 2000.

The network was a decade in the making. In 1990, John was invited to chair the Co-ordinating Commission for Biological Recording, set up to examine how the many disparate elements involved with collecting information about the nation's biodiversity might work together more effectively. Its 1995 report has been influential in guiding actions related to the UK's biodiversity ever since. Key among its consequences was the establishment of the biodiversity network, with John as chairman, a position he held until 2005. It has grown to provide access to over 27m items of data and information on UK biodiversity through its website (www.searchnbn.net).

Born in Paisley, the son of the Rev Harrison Burnett, and educated at Kingswood school, Bath, and Merton College, Oxford, in 1942 John volunteered to serve in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He reached the rank of lieutenant and was mentioned in dispatches. As a Royal Marine commando, he shared a cave with Marshal Tito and introduced him to WB Turrill's The Vegetation of the Balkan Peninsula. This reputedly led to the early creation of national parks in postwar Yugoslavia.

On resuming his interrupted studies, John graduated in botany in 1947, and gained a DPhil in 1953. After a year lecturing at Liverpool University, in 1955 he was appointed professor of botany at St Andrews University, and then dean of the faculty of science (1958-60). Posts at Newcastle (1961-68) and Glasgow (1968-70) universities were followed by his return to Oxford as professor of rural economy (1970-79) and fellow of St John's College. The department of agricultural and forest science that he established was the university's only applied science institution.

As principal and vice-chancellor at Edinburgh University (1979-87), John sought to maintain standards in higher education in response to the changes in funding introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government. This led to her referring to him as "my favourite dissident scientist", but his sustained contribution none the less brought him a knighthood in 1987.

John served on committees of the Nature Conservancy, and later he was a member of the Nature Conservancy Council (1987-89), serving as deputy and then acting chairman during the unhappy time when the council was being broken up into country agencies. Like most senior conservationists, he was bitterly opposed to what was happening, and helped ensure that a UK-wide body was also established, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

He was convinced that academics with high administrative posts must continue with some personal research, in his case on the type of slime mould - a group of curious, mobile, fungi-like organisms - known as myxomycetes. Highly respected as a mycologist, he produced one of the best textbooks on the biology of fungi, his Fundamentals of Mycology (1968). His last book, Fungal Populations and Species (2003), had taken some years to complete, mainly due to his other commitments - to the biodiversity network, serving as executive secretary of the World Council for the Biosphere (1987-93), and as chairman of the International Organisation for Plant Information (1991-96).

John got on with people at all levels, engaging them with his calm enthusiasm; he was a consummate networker. As a "son of the manse", he used his time carefully, but always with concern for the needs of others, and his range of interests meant that a working session would often end with a chat about agriculture, archaeology, archives or art.

He married Margaret Bishop in 1945, and they had two sons and three grandchildren, all of whom survive him.

· John Harrison Burnett, academic, mycologist and conservationist, born January 21 1922; died July 22 2007